The present invention relates to application execution environments. In particular, it relates to running applications within application execution environments and to the preparation of applications for execution within such application execution environments.
Application execution environments provide an environment in which applications may be executed. They typically provide a number of functions which support the execution of applications within the environment. Such functions include, for example, functions which allow control over the applications running in the environment, provide access to storage, facilitate inter-application communications within the environment or allow communications with external services outside of the environment. However, there are many other functions which may be provided by an application execution environment in order to support the execution of applications. Applications running within an application execution environment may make use of these functions provided by the application execution environment in order to carry out their tasks. At a general level, any operating system may be considered as providing an application execution environment. However, more specialized application execution environments exist which are designed to support rapid high-volume online transaction processing, such as Customer Information Control System, CICS® (CICS is a trademark of International Business Machines Corporation, registered in many jurisdictions worldwide). CICS® is commonly used within a mainframe computing system environment to manage large-scale computer processing transactions for “enterprise” user organizations such as banks, brokerage firms, insurance companies, large retailers, and so on. More specialized application execution environments, such as CICS®, typically provide functionality which goes beyond (or augments) the functionality provided by an operating system. Such application execution environments may be provided as middleware running on top of an operating system.